One of the things that drives people is a search for meaning. "Graffiti on my Soul" by Johanna is about her search for meaning, as she looks back on her life and some of the things she has endured.
Described as a spiritual suspense memoir, the book starts in a time of crisis and proceeds through flashbacks, and their significance to the author. Johanna has had a varied life, going from being a nun to a mother of five, and living around the country.
One of the major parts of the book deals with Johanna's time in Yorkton. A member of the Federowich family, Johanna says that her happy times in the city have been an important factor in helping her get through the difficult times in her life.
"Yorkton is really a part of my heart... We have a foundation, the foundation in our lives and our early memories. My memories in Yorkton have given me a balance, and are one of the factors that gave me the strength to get through what we went through," Johanna says.
What they went through was the arrival of Johanna's mother-in-law, who she describes as having a psychopathic personality and "possibly demonically possessed." She says this person did everything in her power to ruin the lives of her and her family, through the legal system, by making threats, and through other ways.
"The things she did in our life were a horror story... It took everything and a little bit more to deal with the situation," Johanna says.
"Maybe the spiritual arises out of that, when there's nobody else to turn to, you turn to god."
Johanna wrote the book under a pseudonym because she still fears her mother-in-law, even though she is very old and close to death.
The book is about making sense of those events and the meaning of her life overall, and Johanna says she has been surprised by the number of people in similar situations, with a difficult person in their lives. She says many have told her that her situation has helped them get the strength to deal with their own situations.
"We can't choose the events in our life. Many of them are not pretty or artistic. For "Graffiti on my Soul," the graffiti was all the things that have happened to me and my family. Some of them were attractive, and some of them were very unattractive, and they went beyond a physical imprint and left an impression on my soul, the very deepest level of who I am," Johanna says.
She says this book is a way for her to make her mark on the world, and she describes it as her last words, "all 1,000 of them."
"Graffiti on my Soul" is available at www.amazon.ca and is now available through ebook vendors. It is also available from the publisher's website at www.eloquentbooks.com/Graffitionmy Soul.html.
